XFCE Startup

Recently my battery died. Well it was about to die so I got it replaced. But it got me thinking about setting up a bare bone lightweight desktop to use for browsing and coding when battery life is important.

I setup XFCE 4.4.2 with conkeror and emacs, happily ran emacs and type "XS".

Damn Caps_Lock key. I had it remapped to be another CTRL in Gnome. It was a simple option in the settings program. Nothing like that in XFCE, so I scripted it using xmodmap

xmodmap -e "remove Lock = Caps_Lock"
xmodmap -e "remove Control = Control_L"
xmodmap -e "keycode 66 = Control_L"
xmodmap -e "add Control = Control_L"

So I put it in a file ~/.xmodmap

remove Lock = Caps_Lock
remove Control = Control_L
keycode 66 = Control_L
add Control = Control_L

and then started looking for a way to call "xmodmap ~/.xmodmap" at startup. I was directed to ~/.config/autostart by one post. But this is not true.

I put it in the .bashrc but that required starting the terminal for the script to run and Ubuntu does not use bash_profile.

So I was searching for XFCE 4.4.2 specific setup when I came across this post. So if you are looking to autostart anything with XFCE, create a ".desktop" file in the /etc/xdg/autostart folder.